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Boothby Staff
As 2025 starts to wind down, you might be thinking of the year ahead and where you might want to go. For bartendery and brand types, where you want to go might neatly coincide with where a bar show is taking place.
And there are more bar shows than ever, which feels anecdotally right. I mean, we added our own three day celebration of bars, bartenders and drinks to the calendar in 2024, and Bartenders’ Weekender is set for a big year three in Adelaide next year — so I have some skin in the game.
But bar world influencer and content creator Danil Nevsky has some stats to back it up in his recent piece in Drinks International on ‘The future for bar shows’:
“In 2021, I started an online bar event calendar. The idea was to have a simple, easy-to-access, synchronised-straight-to-your-smartphone calendar that everyone can use to plan their year. In 2021 we had 14 bar events around the world. In 2025 we have 68.”
It’s an interesting piece from the European point of view, and as he notes in it, times aren’t exactly great for brand budgets over there, something that the proliferation of bar shows — from Bangkok to the Baltic — doesn’t seem to reflect. There are too many bar shows around the world chasing the same brand money, and it is unsustainable, he writes. And goes on to suggest how he thinks we got to this place of bar show saturation.